In the past Editors Meeting Santander, on the table for editing "book test", we had occasion to attend a new assault versus culture debate edition edition market. Although we declare strong advocates and frequenters of what the teacher Einaudi called "issue" yes ", how timely Jorge Herralde reminded all attendees, the debate culture / market between publishers reactivated during a commentary on the trilogy of Larsson. Some editor dared to assert that only books he edited "to think", while the representative of Metro defended some quality books written by a renowned journalist in his country. Aside from outdated elitism, which is imposed is the reality. In an industry beset by crisis in relative terms, seeing people on the subway and buses with Larsson's books is something that moves open to discussion. The extraordinary level of sales achieved in so short time for this trilogy, with a compulsive buying the third volume the same day it appeared in bookstores, forcing the sector, publishers and booksellers, to reflect on this phenomenon, transcending a Manichaean debate culture / market. We do several questions:
- Are not Larsson's books more than just a best seller?
- Do they respond to a fashion or a trend-communitarian sociological?
- Is this a case study for teachers of marketing or sales by sociologists who study consumer habits?
reading these days Chartier Rogert , a researcher on the world of written culture, the book and reading of modernity to this day, we read a peculiar definition of 'culture' that can help us shed light on this phenomenon, "this demonstration articulates the symbolic productions and aesthetic experiences, subtracted from the urgency of everyday life, with the languages, rituals and behaviors by which a community lives and reflects their bond with the world, with others and with itself. "
No doubt that the billion dollar sale of Larsson's trilogy, and a fashion business for a publisher, several hundred distributors and retail outlets, including independent bookstores, may be called "symbolic production" of Western society. Some journalists have dubbed these best seller as "quality", to distinguish them from other products of a blockbuster sequels, or provoking it, whose literary quality leaves much to be desired.
With Larsson, and not purists like us, is going to like some and others, the exquisite and mass. We do not know if Larsson's books are a literary gem, but certainly entertaining virtue is not incompatible at all, in principle, with a second reading "to think." Of course, this phenomenon should make us "think" the architects of the sector, to discover that after Larsson's trilogy lies not only a business but a mass phenomenon, in short, a discourse that transcends the materiality of books .
Reading back to Chartier, remember that I. Kant in his Metaphysics of Morals (1796), noted the dual nature of the book, material and discursive, and thus distinguish between the book as "opus mechanicum" as a material object, which belongs to the buyer, and the book as a speech to an audience, which remains the property of the author and that can only be put into circulation by their principals. Therefore implies the separation of the essential identity of the work and the indefinite plurality of states, or if you like, between the noun and the accident, the ideal and transcendent text, on the one hand, and multiple forms of publication, another.
Larsson will remain a social phenomenon as it becomes available in paperback, even when the digital platform to release the trilogy in Metro e-book format there by Christmas. And here is the paradox: the defenders of the trial, of 'books to think, "claimed an idealist conception of the issue, now, we note with amazement, turns against him. Chartier reminds us, David Kastan calls "Platonic" the perspective in which a work transcends all possible embodiments materials, and "pragmatic" to which he claims that no text exists outside of material form that they read or hear.
Well, despite the immediate sale and millionaire and media noise of "blooms" of Larsson (read pragmatic), we believe that this phenomenon (read idealistic) transcend the media. As a paradigm of a social revolution, economic and cultural, the Millennium trilogy announces new era for the book world, where it is incorporated into the logic of mass phenomena in the large consumption of cultural products, to analyze not read rates (teachers and academics) but consumption patterns (social scientists and marketing managers).
Culture and market are not mutually exclusive, then. The big question to ask is this: Can a publishing phenomenon as it does sell other books? That is, after Millennium what?
0 comments:
Post a Comment